Tag Archives: Jason O’Connell

MOLIÈRE IN NEW YORK: SOCIAL SATIRE IS NOT ALWAYS THE BEST MEDICINE

Sarah Stiles and Mark Linn-Baker stand out in Red Bull adaptation of Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid (photo by Carol Rosegg)

THE IMAGINARY INVALID
New World Stages
340 West Fiftieth St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through June 29, $69-$140
www.redbulltheater.com
newworldstages.com

Two madcap farces loosely based on Molière satires about wealth and class are currently running off Broadway, and both throw everything at the wall, hoping enough will stick. One succeeds significantly more than the other, but neither turns out to be exemplary.

In 2017, writer Jeffrey Hatcher and Red Bull artistic director Jesse Berger teamed up on a hilarious adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 The Government Inspector, taking aim at health care, education, the court system, surveillance, class distinction, poverty, power, the institution of marriage, and government itself. They followed that up in 2021 with an overbaked version of Ben Jonson’s 1610 The Alchemist, which also skewered health care and class distinction. Their latest collaboration, an adaptation of Molière’s final play, 1673’s The Imaginary Invalid, falls somewhere in between, a frantic comedy about money, loyalty, and faith in science, based on a new translation by Mirabelle Ordinaire.

Continuing at New World Stages through June 29, The Imaginary Invalid takes place on two-time Tony winner Beowulf Boritt’s flimsy yet elegant set, a Louis XIV–style blue and pink room with a dressing screen, a mobile hospital bed, portraits of Molière and prancing cherubs on the wall, and doors at either side that will be peeked through and slammed repeatedly over the course of eighty-five frenetic, if repetitive, minutes. The master of the house, Argan (a delightful Mark Linn-Baker), is a rich hypochondriac who spends most of his time in bed, in his pajamas, slippers, and night cap, complaining about various aches and pains, losing feeling in his buttocks, and evacuating his bowels at scheduled times. His maid, Toinette (a riotous Sarah Stiles), takes care of him in a cheeky manner, lobbing subtle, and not-so-subtle, bombs at him.

Argan’s daughter from his first marriage, Angélique (Emilie Kouatchou), has fallen in love with Cléante (John Yi), but Argan has just promised her to Thomas Diafoirus (Russell Daniels), the doofus son of his surgeon (Arnie Burton). Argan is also tended to by Dr. Diafoirus’s brother, Dr. Purgon (Burton), who takes advantage of Argan’s hypochondria, and Dr. Fleurant (Burton), an enema specialist who dresses like a low-rent Batman TV villain. Meanwhile, Argan’s second wife, the voluptuous but devious Béline (Emily Swallow), is plotting with her lover, the lawyer Monsieur de Bonnefoi (Manoel Felciano), to change Argan’s will so she gets everything and Angélique nothing.

Béline (Emily Swallow) and de Bonnefoi (Manoel Felciano) try to trick Argan (Mark Linn-Baker) in Molière comedy at New World Stages (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The only one who is aware of all that is going on is Toinette, who relishes the insanity and inanity but is not about to lose her job over the scheming and deceptions.

Hatcher and Berger fill The Imaginary Invalid with inconsistent and intermittent fourth-wall breaking, clever and mundane anachronisms, self-referential inside jokes, playful props, and enough rear-end references that if I never hear another word about buttocks and enemas it will be too soon. But it’s also silly fun, even if it is more Three Stooges and Looney Tunes than Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello, despite direct nods to Groucho and A&C.

Tilly Grimes’s costumes are a romp all their own, particularly the Joe “Stinky” Besser baby sailor outfit Daniels wears as Thomas, along with Béline’s lavish red gown and pouffy hairdo. Music director and composer Greg Pliska adds to the frivolity with parodies of such French songs as “La Vie en Rose,” “La Marseillaise,” “Hooray for Captain Spaulding,” and “I Dreamed a Dream.” Tracy Bersley’s movement choreography is appropriately frenetic.

At one point, when Toinette is arguing with Argan that he is getting bad advice from his wife and doctors, he says, “Look, when I’m sick, I call a doctor! When I want something dusted, I don’t call you because you don’t dust!” She answers, “I see. You won’t listen to me because I’m a servant.” Argan: “And a woman.” Toinette: “Well, if you need to hear the same said by a man, I refer you to Monsieur Molière.” To which Argan replies: “Molière! Molière writes plays! If I were his doctor, I wouldn’t prescribe him a single pill! I’d say: ‘Die, playwright, like a show without a star!’”

An ill Molière died on February 17, 1673, shortly after collapsing onstage during a production of The Imaginary Invalid that he was directing and starring in and which included the following lines: “To the Devil with him! If I were a doctor, I would be revenged on him for his impertinence, and when he was sick, I would let him die without relief. He would cry and beg in vain, but I would not prescribe him the least bleeding or enema, and would say to him, ‘Die! Die! Molière!, that will teach you to make fun of doctors.’”

The Imaginary Invalid makes fun of doctors and patients, of health care and the law, of greed and avarice, and of theater itself. “Is there a cure?” Argan asks. Well, both the Bible and the Mayo Clinic agree that laughter is the best medicine.

Taylor Mac reveals hypocrisy inherent in arts funding in Prosperous Fools (photo by Travis Emery Hackett)

PROSPEROUS FOOLS
Theatre for a New Audience, Polonsky Shakespeare Center
262 Ashland Pl. between Lafayette Ave. & Fulton St.
Tuesday-Sunday through June 29, $95-$125
www.tfana.org

A few years before The Imaginary Invalid, Molière wrote Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Middle Class Gentleman), the story of a rich bourgeois man obsessed with becoming an accepted member of the French aristocracy. Taylor Mac (who uses the pronoun judy) reimagines the play, now called Prosperous Fools, as a contemporary skewering of wealth, power, art, philanthropy, and celebrity, set at a gala fundraiser for a nonprofit ballet company. Adding elements from judy’s personal experiences at gala fundraisers — as a waiter, a guest, a performer, and an honoree — Mac delivers a frustrating, often confusing, and overly repetitive production that only settles down with a brilliant final monolog that spreads the blame for the terrible situation nonprofits find themselves in today.

Begun twelve years ago as a commission for an institution that ultimately rejected it, the show was turned down by numerous other New York City companies before being picked up by Theatre for a New Audience, which is presenting it at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center through June 29, directed by Tony and Obie winner Darko Tresnjak, who is unable to keep it from careening way out of control.

Mac stars as the Artist, who is choreographing a three-hour ballet relating the Greek myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans; he paid the price by being tied to a rock and having his liver eaten over and over again by an eagle throughout eternity. Just about everything that can go wrong does as the Artist, the dancer playing Prometheus (Ian Joseph Paget), and the three muses (Em Stockwell, Megumi Iwama, and Cara Seymour) prepare for the evening. The lights aren’t working, the orchestra doesn’t have the full score, and not everyone is thrilled that one of the honoree donors, dimwitted billionaire $#@%$ (Jason O’Connell), is morally and ethically challenged.

“I know you wouldn’t be able to do this work without $#@!$’s financial support, but he’s also a real estate petroleum mogul who makes pharmaceutical heroin out of endangered species,” the Intern (Kaliswa Brewster) says to the Artist, pointing out that the oligarch was also “that judge on that show where they made poor people compete for who could be the best beggar.”

The conversation continues until the Artist explains, “Buckle up! You want a life in the arts, this is what it looks like. You work for free, you beg for permission to ask for permission to do what you’ve worked for free to do, and after years of this humiliation, you finally break through, get yourself a patron, and he represents everything you’ve been fighting against your entire life. So organize the sheet music, fetch my coffee, and then go home and eat your top rhamen!”

The Philanthropoid (Jennifer Regan) readies to debase herself to both honorees, $#@%$ and glamorous actress and humanitarian activist ####-### (Sierra Boggess), whose main cause is helping impoverished children around the world. “I am not allowed happiness beyond the children,” she declares. ####-### is occasionally joined by a living prop, the Pot-Bellied Child (Aerina Park DeBoer), and uses the Intern, who is poor and Black, as an example of what is wrong with society. Walking around with a clipboard, the Stage Manager (Jennifer Smith) tries to keep everything running but doesn’t have much luck and takes offense when her clothes are ridiculed as those of “the working man.”

Meanwhile, $#@%$ demands that he needs his Wally Shawn in order to hang out with cultured people; American actor, writer, and living legend Wallace Shawn, he of The Princess Bride, Young Sheldon, My Dinner with Andre, and so many other beloved classics, is not available, so the Artist dresses up as him and fairly adequately speaks like him. “Couldn’t you hire the actual Wally Shawn?” the Artist asks. The Philanthropoid responds, “Money can’t buy everyone.”

As the gala proceeds, so does the mayhem, which describes the production as well.

The Intern (Kaliswa Brewster), $#@%$ (Jason O’Connell), the Philanthropoid (Jennifer Regan), and the Stage Manager (Jennifer Smith) aren’t the only ones who are confused about Prosperous Fools (photo by Hollis King)

Taken individually, Prosperous Fools should be another blast by Mac, whose previous works include Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, The Lily’s Revenge, and A 24-Decade History of Popular Music. Alexander Dodge’s set, with an Astor Plaza–like cube, square plastic swimming pool, and headless animals, is a hoot, as are Anita Yavich’s costumes, although $#@%$ dressed as Elon Musk in the first act and Donald Trump in the second feels like overkill. The boisterous choreography is by Company XIV’s Austin McCormick, with music by Oran Eldor.

However, there is too much of everything. Jokes go on too long and are repeated, the purposeful overacting grows tiresome, and, something I thought I’d never say, no more Wallace Shawn, please! Many of Mac’s points are currently being made in the Amazon Prime series Étoile, which deals with a dancer swap between Paris and New York, a worrisome gala, an ethically and morally challenged oligarch throwing his money around to get whatever he wants, along with an eclectic choreographer who believes he is misunderstood. (DeBoer is in both Étoile and Prosperous Fools.)

The show concludes with a marvelous monolog by the Artist that brilliantly narrows down what it’s all about, making each and every one of us complicit in the hypocrisy without even mentioning DOGE — performers, choreographers, donors, artistic directors, woke gatekeepers, and, perhaps most courageously, the audience. “Do you deserve because you try? / And do you own what you can buy? / Does charity absolve your greed? / Does wanting much make others need?” he asks. “Is selling out what you deplore? / And how then have you been a whore? / Should you be thanked for being wealthy? / Should you be shamed, is that unhealthy?”

Both The Imaginary Invalid and Prosperous Fools could use a second opinion. Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard!

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

SOUL SEARCHING: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI AND BABE

The Light and the Dark looks at the life and times of Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi (photo by James Leynse)

THE LIGHT AND THE DARK (THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI)
Primary Stages, 59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St, between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 15, $66-$131
www.59e59.org

After seeing Kate Hamill’s The Light and the Dark (the life and times of Artemisia Gentileschi) and Jessica Goldberg’s Babe on the same day, I was hard-pressed to figure out why every woman doesn’t just go all Judith on their own Holofernes. While both plays explore misogyny, sexism, control of a woman’s body, and the dominant patriarchy in the arts, one does so much better than the other, although neither is ultimately successful.

At 59E59, Primary Stages is presenting The Light and the Dark, about Artemisia Gentileschi, the early Italian Baroque painter whose career was temporarily derailed by sexual assault and gender discrimination. Hamill’s previous feminist-driven works include stirring adaptations of Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Vanity Fair, and Dracula. She has portrayed such characters as Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennet, Meg March, Renfield, and Marianne Dashwood; in The Light and the Dark she inhabits the title role with a tender ferociousness as Artemisia matures from a precocious seven-year-old girl to one of the most talented and important artists of her era, even as she’s held back by men and social mores every step of the way.

Artemisia knows what she wants from a young age. Her Tuscan-born father, Orazio (Wynn Harmon), is a naturalistic, technically skillful painter who delivers precisely what his patrons desire. Admitting he doesn’t know how to raise a girl on his own, he decides to send her to a nunnery for her education, telling his daughter, “Think, if I build a big enough fortune and you mark the sisters well enough, you may be a fine lady — the wife or the mother of the great artist of tomorrow!” Misia, as he calls her, responds, “I don’t want to be a lady! I am I, your Artemisia. And I want to be a painter!”

When she is nine, Orazio lets Misia begin working in his studio, and six years later she is allowed to start painting alongside Agostino Tassi (Matthew Saldívar) and Cosimo Quorli (Jason O’Connell), which could be considered scandalous, especially when Orazio brings in a nude model, a sex worker named Maria (Joey Parsons). Soon the arrogant Agostino takes a personal interest in Artemisia, who is proving to be an exceptional artist with a unique perspective on traditional biblical scenes, and scandal does indeed ensue, against Artemisia’s will.

Artemisia Gentileschi has been undergoing a renaissance of her own this century, a heroic figure for the current time, spurred on by the 2002 Met exhibit “Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy,” such books as Mary D. Garrard’s Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe and Gina Siciliano’s I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi, and such plays as Sara Fellini’s NEC SPE / NEC METU and Howard Barker’s Scenes from an Execution. Artemisia often repeats “I, I, I” when talking about herself, trying to establish an identity that her father and his friends will not allow her to have because she is a woman, and she is prone to cursing like a sailor, dropping F-bombs again and again.

“Before Caravaggio, painters / Started with the light. / Blank canvas, blank fresco, / And painted layers upon that blankness — / But Caravaggio starts in the darkness / And carves his way out from the shadows,” she says in a way that refers to her own situation. She also declares, as if for all women, “Why should I suffer for nothing? / If I cannot undo it — and I cannot undo it. . . . / I can make it right. / I can control it.”

The show is visually beautiful, from Brittany Vasta’s alluring studio set to Jen Caprio’s lovely period costumes, Seth Reiser’s lighting, and Kylee Loera’s projections of such masterworks by Artemisia as Judith and Holofernes, Susanna and the Elders, The Allegory of Inclination, and Madonna and Child. The cast is effective, but Hamill and director Jade King Carroll too often get caught up in overly earnest monologues and preachy explications; Artemesia speaks at the audience instead of to them. Several didactic art lectures could have been cut or shortened — the play is too long at two and a half hours with intermission — in favor of the narrative itself, which can be compelling.

However, Carroll and Hamill do make The Light and the Dark feel relevant to what is happening today, particularly in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Both female actors, Hamill as Artemisia and Parsons as Maria, ultimately take ownership of their bodies away from the men while subverting the male gaze; each gets fully nude, standing boldly onstage, not mere naked subjects to be depicted on canvas but real women shouting out their independence. They might not be holding daggers, preparing to cut off a perpetrator’s head, but you can see and feel their weapons nonetheless.

Gus (Arliss Howard) and Abby (Marisa Tomei) wonder about a new employee in Babe (photo by Monique Carboni)

BABE
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 22, $99-$119
thenewgroup.org

Jessica Goldberg’s Babe has much in common with Kate Hamill’s The Light and the Dark (the life and times of Artemisia Gentileschi); instead of taking place in the world of Baroque painting, it is set in the contemporary music industry, where an old-school record producer, Gus (Arliss Howard), spews sexism and misogyny in his search for artists with a soul. He gives short shrift to his longtime right-hand person, Abby (Marisa Tomei), who discovered 1990s sensation Kat Wonder (Gracie McGraw) but has never received the recognition she deserves.

When a young Gen Z woman, Katherine Becker (McGraw), comes in for a job interview and ultimately gets hired, each character’s flaws become exposed, as well as their strengths, but it is hard to care in this lackluster story searching for its own purpose, never filling in the blank canvas it started with.

Comparisons abound between the two shows. “I don’t want to make people feel great, I want to destroy shit! I want the girls in the front, moshing the fuck out of each other!” Kat declares in a way Gentileschi never would have. Abby, who is gay, explains, “People think if you’re a certain age without a partner, you’re alone. But it’s not true,” evoking Artemisia saying, “I have no interest — in marrying,” but with less conviction. While Hamill empowers Artemisia, having her stand onstage naked, using her body as a model for the self-portrait Allegory of Inclination, Goldberg makes Abby sexless, having had a double mastectomy as a result of cancer. “So it doesn’t really make me feel —” she tells Katherine, implying she lacks physical and emotional desire and confidence. While The Light and the Dark references Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Donatelli, and Botticelli, Babe brings up Liz Phair, Bob Dylan, Joan Jett, and Kathleen Hannah.

At one point in The Light and the Dark, men assume that Artemisia did not actually paint anything, that a woman is incapable of creating high-quality art and that someone else must be behind it all, which is one of the reasons Artemisia signs her name on her canvases “in bold type . . . And wait for my accolades to roll in!” In Babe, a New Group production at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Abby eventually asserts, “I want my NAME. On the record.” As women in fields run by men, neither receives those accolades, but Abby has settled for compromising where Artemisia keeps up the fight.

Marisa Tomei, Arliss Howard, and Gracie McGraw star in the New Group’s Babe
(photo by Monique Carboni)

During the job interview, amid outdated questions that would drive a human resources department to drink, Gus asks Katherine, “Do you have a soul?” Unfortunately, it’s Babe itself that lacks heart and soul. Even at only eighty-five minutes it drags on, like side two of an old record that doesn’t live to up to the flip side.

Derek McLane’s office set is attractive and BETTY’s original music is fine, but the narrative and time shifts are bumpy; director Scott Elliott never gets a handle on the rhythm. Interestingly, although Gus has a disdain for groups, preferring solo artists performing songs written by others, he wears a Killers T-shirt, the Las Vegas band led by lead singer and chief songwriter Brandon Flowers. The costumes, which never change, are by Jeff Mahshie.

Whereas it is obvious why Hamill made The Light and the Dark, celebrating a woman who faced tremendous obstacles in order to express herself through her remarkable art, it is decidedly unclear what points Goldberg (Refuge, Good Thing) is trying to make in Babe; it’s like a concept album without a concept. It purports to be about “the American spirit of individualism,” as Abby says, as well as the resistance to the DEI movement, but it’s as flat as an LP that is not going to go gold or platinum anytime soon, instead gathering dust on a shelf.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BECOMES A WOMAN

Emma Pfitzer Price shines in the Mint’s world premiere of Becomes a Woman (photo by Todd Cerveris)

BECOMES A WOMAN
Mint Theater at New York City Center Stage II
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 18, $45-$90
minttheater.org
nycitycenter.org

There was something extra special about opening night at the Mint’s world premiere of Becomes a Woman, written by Betty Smith, the Williamsburg-born novelist and author most famous for the semiautobiographical 1943 bestseller A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Smith’s hundred-year-old daughter, Nancy Jean, was in attendance, sitting in the first row at New York City Center Stage II.

Equally remarkable was that this excellent play, written in 1931, has never before been produced, anywhere. It is the Mint’s mission to resurrect long-lost plays, and this show, under Britt Berke’s loving, caring direction, is a sparkling gem that takes on feminist issues well ahead of its time, in intelligent, well-developed ways.

In her off-Broadway debut, Emma Pfitzer Price shines as nineteen-year-old Francie Nolan, who sings popular songs in Kress’s five-and-dime store on DeKalb Ave. Although the character shares the same name as the protagonist of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, there are few other similarities. (The store is also a fictionalized version of the actual Kress’s.) This Francie lives in an Irish neighborhood in Bushwick with her tough-talking father, a city cop (Jeb Brown); her old-fashioned mother (Antoinette Lavecchia), who spends most of her time cooking and cleaning; and her two teenage brothers, Frankie (Tim Webb) and Johnny (Jack Mastrianni), who are ready to quit school and start working, against their mother’s wishes.

“You’re going to keep on going to school. As long as your father has a good job and Francie keeps on working, my children are going to get a good education,” Ma Nolan tells them. “Now, Francie went to high school for two years. She wanted to go longer but two years is enough for a girl. She didn’t mind the scales. She practiced. That’s why she’s earning such good money as a musician today.”

Florry (Pearl Rhein), Francie (Emma Pfitzer Price), and Tessie (Gina Daniels) work together in a five and dime (photo by Todd Cerveris)

Wearing a sexy black nightclub dress, Francie sings popular tunes, accompanied by the sassy Florry (Pearl Rhein) on piano, in an effort to sell the sheet music. But it turns out that nearly all the men who ask to hear a song are more interested in going out with Francie, who refuses to date customers or “strange men.” She’s tired of hearing them say, one after another, “Are you doing anything tonight, baby?” To which she regularly answers, “Yes I am. And I’m busy every other night this week too. And next week.”

Among the songs Francie sings are “Left Alone,” “Me and My Family Blues,” “He’s My Man,” and “I Don’t Owe Nothing to Nobody,” titles that get to the heart of her character; dramaturg Amy Stoller created a music playlist that can be heard here.

Florry believes that Francie is a scared little mouse who should assert herself more and take chances to get a man. “She’s the kind that just tempts people to pick on her. She’s so afraid of everything,” Florry tells the older Tessie (Gina Daniels), who works the register and is in charge of the flowers. “She never fights for a seat in the trolley going home. I never have to stand.”

Francie is being wooed by taxi driver Jimmy O’Neill (Christopher Reed Brown), who fails to thrill her. But when the dashing and handsome Leonard Kress Jr. (Peterson Townsend), son of the chain owner (Duane Boutté), shows a liking for her, she starts dreaming of a better future.

Pa and Ma Nolan (Jeb Brown and Antoinette Lavecchia) have issues with their daughter in Betty Smith play (photo by Todd Cerveris)

“He’s different. I know he is. I know he’s not the doing-anything-tonight-baby kind. I’d hate him if he was like that,” Francie says. “What do you want a man to do? Worship you from a cloud?” Florry asks. “No, but I want a man to decide whether he likes me before he spends an evening with me and not after,” Francie explains. “Men ain’t made that way. A girl has to really like a man before she gets intimate with him but a man has to get really intimate with a girl before he likes her. Anybody will tell you that,” the cynical Florry says. “That’s not true. It can’t be true,” Francie insists.

Finally putting herself out there, Francie discovers that more of it is true than she ever imagined. But instead of wilting like a dying flower, she decides to take control of her situation, which presents a whole new set of challenges.

As with the best Mint shows, Becomes a Woman is exquisitely rendered, its two hours (with two intermissions) beautifully paced by Berke in her outstanding off-Broadway debut. Vicki R. Davis’s sets morph from the elegant Kress store to the plain and sensible Nolan home, which undergoes an important change after the second act. Emilee McVey-Lee’s effective period costumes range from the Kresses’s sharp suits to Ma Nolan’s frumpy house wear, Pa Nolan’s practical suspenders, and Florry’s long, flirty dresses. Mary Louise Geiger’s lighting and M. Florian Staab’s sound keep the audience immersed in the proceedings.

Juilliard graduate Price is a revelation as Francie, fully embodying the eminently likable character’s transformation from frightened wallflower doing whatever her parents tell her to into a strong young woman making her own decisions about her body and her life, not all of which end up the way she wants. Daniels (Network, All the Way) is wonderful as Tessie, Francie’s friend and mentor who has overcome her difficult past with the help of her charming boyfriend who always finds the goodness in situations, ambulance driver Max, played by a scene-stealing Jason O’Connell (Pride and Prejudice, The Dork Night).

The fancy Leonard Kress Jr. (Peterson Townsend) woos Francie (Emma Pfitzer Price) in Becomes a Woman (photo by Todd Cerveris)

Townsend (Chains, Fire Shut Up in My Bones) and Boutté (Parade, Carousel) excel as father and son, each offering surprises as Smith’s plot evolves. The fine cast also features Jillian Louis, Scott Redmond, Madeline Seidman, and Phillip Taratula.

Smith, who wrote such other plays as Sawdust Heart and So Gracious Is the Time and such other novels as Tomorrow Will Be Better and Joy in the Morning — as well as the book, with George Abbott, for the 1951 Broadway musical adaptation of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — died in 1972 at the age of seventy-five and never saw Becomes a Woman onstage. More than fifty years later, her daughter got to witness this splendid play, a prescient exploration of a young woman’s coming of age that is not dated in the least; sadly, much of it is all too relevant today.

In a program essay by scholar, teacher, and historian Maya Cantu, Smith is quoted as saying, “A hundred years after I’m dead, people will still be reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” Hopefully, a hundred years from now, people will also still be going to the theater to experience Becomes a Woman.

JUDGMENT DAY

Stationmaster Thomas Hudetz (Luke Kirby) salutes as train passes by in Judgment Day (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Monday – Saturday through January 10, $55-$195
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org

In his 1936–37 work Judgment Day, Austro-Hungarian novelist and playwright Ödön von Horváth warns of the rise of fascism in Germany, comparing it to a speeding train approaching a station that has no idea it’s coming. That’s the central motif in Richard Jones’s admirable if uneven new production, adapted by Christopher Shinn, that opened today at Park Ave. Armory for a run through January 10. Jones, who presented a fierce version of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape at the armory in 2017, once again makes unique use of the building’s vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall; Paul Steinberg’s set features oversized, flat, painted plywood trees around the back, sides, and corners and two giant, movable blocks of unpainted wood, like a child’s toys, one in the shape of an arch, the other flat and angled like a stray wall from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Mimi Jordan Sherin’s stark lighting creates distinct reflections on the shiny black floor, like the characters’ souls on display.

It’s the 1930s, and a lumberjack (Andy Murray), the gossipy Frau Leimgruber (Harriet Harris), and a traveling salesman (Jason O’Connell) are waiting for a local train. Stationmaster Thomas Hudetz (Luke Kirby) emerges only to ring the signal bell, standing at attention and saluting as the express roars by, thrillingly portrayed by Drew Levy’s immersive sound design and the actors’ dramatic reactions. After seeing off her fiancé, butcher Ferdinand (Alex Breaux), ingénue Anna (Susannah Perkins) teases the straitlaced Hudetz as his shrewish wife, Frau Hudetz (Alyssa Bresnahan), watches from above. Anna makes an unexpected and unwelcome move, beginning a chain of events that leads to the death of eighteen people, including a track worker (O’Connell) and train driver Pokorny (Maurice Jones) but leaving a witness, stoker Herr Kohut (George Merrick).

Paul Steinberg’s set features two large movable wooden structures (photo by Stephanie Berger)

A policeman (Charles Brice) and detective (Joe Wegner) arrive to find out what happened, but falsehood, deception, and long-simmering desires and grievances soon boil over. “I’m telling the truth! I swear to everything!” Frau Hudetz argues. Frau Hudetz’s brother, pharmacist Alfons (Henry Stram), becomes an outcast even after he disowns his sister. “Everything is connected,” he insists, but no one is listening to him. Guilt and mob mentality tear at the fabric of this small community, resulting in yet more death and destruction. “People are so fickle,” waitress Leni (Jeena Yi) says. “Who gives a shit about people,” Hudetz responds.

Paul Steinberg’s set steals the show in new production at Park Ave. Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Jones’s staging often makes the characters look like little figures in a dollhouse, dwarfed by the two wooden blocks, as if they’re being manipulated by unseen forces. In his sharp uniform (the costumes are by Antony McDonald) and direct speech, Hudetz resembles a Nazi. “I was always a diligent official!” he says over and over, reminiscent of what would later become the Third Reich excuse “I was only following orders.” Judgment Day is a biting indictment of prewar German morality, written by Horváth after he had fled Germany and shortly before he died in Paris when struck by a tree branch during a thunderstorm at the age of thirty-six. The parable can’t quite carry the weight of the production through its ninety minutes, drifting between Expressionism and realism while evoking the style of Bertolt Brecht and a streamlined Robert Wilson, sometimes getting stuck in between. But there are numerous breathtaking moments as Jones (Into the Woods, The Trojans), Shinn (Dying City, Where Do We Live), and Horváth (Tales from the Vienna Woods, Youth without God) take aim at the spread of fascism and groupthink, in the 1930s and now.

KURT VONNEGUT’S HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

Penelope (Kate MacCluggage) meets her husband-to-be (Jason O’Connell) in stellar revival of Kurt Vonnegut’s Wanda June

The Duke on 42nd Street
229 West 42nd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Thursday – Tuesday through November 29, $49-$109
www.wheelhousetheater.org

Wheelhouse Theater Company is throwing quite a party eight times a week at the Duke on 42nd St., presenting its wickedly funny, devilishly clever adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s first play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June. The glorious production, which (re)opened last night following an earlier sold-out run at the Gene Frankel Theater, is everything a work by Vonnegut should be: surreal, unpredictable, laugh-out-loud hysterical, extraordinarily intelligent, bold, daring, and challenging while taking on such wholly contemporary themes as war, misogyny, racism, capitalism, religion, gun control, animal rights, white privilege, machismo, and feminism. Brittany Vasta’s urban-jungle set immerses the audience in the show from the very beginning, as ticket holders walk down a lobby with fake plants and real prints by Vonnegut, then go through a bamboo curtain to enter the main space, the same entrance the characters use to come in and leave. The walls are covered with animal-head trophies. The doorbells emit animal sounds instead of rings or chimes. “How do you do. My name is Penelope Ryan,” a woman (Kate MacCluggage) says, standing in a line with four male actors. “This is a simple-minded play about men who enjoy killing — and those who don’t.”

The quartet slowly introduces itself: Harold Ryan (Jason O’Connell), a professional soldier and adventurer who is married to Penelope but has been missing for eight years; Dr. Norbert Woodly (Matt Harrington), a peacenik who believes in healing and is in love with Penelope; Col. Looseleaf Harper (Craig Wesley Divino), a pilot who dropped the bomb on Nagasaki and is missing with Harold in the Amazon rainforest; Paul Ryan (Finn Faulconer), Harold and Penelope’s twelve-year-old son, who is hoping his father will show up unexpectedly because it’s the father’s birthday; and Herb Shuttle (Kareem M. Lucas), a vacuum-cleaner salesman who also is in love with Penelope. The wonderfully absurdist story also involves a trio of heavenly ghosts: Mildred (MacCluggage), one of Harold’s previous wives; Major Siegfried von Konigswald (O’Connell), the “Beast of Yugoslavia” who was killed by Harold; and ten-year-old Wanda June (Charlotte Wise or Brie Zimmer), whose name is on Harold’s birthday cake. When Harold and Looseleaf do indeed return, the brutish Harold sniffs around his apartment like an animal come home to roost. He grunts and snorts (like a male chauvinist pig?) and even makes out with one of the trophy heads, reclaiming every inch of his territory. However, while he hasn’t changed much, Penelope has gone through a major transformation, attending college and learning that she can make her own decisions about what she wants out of life — and what she doesn’t. Harold may not consider Norbert and Herb legitimate threats, but he still has to contend with Penelope herself. Meanwhile, he is not the least bit frightened when he finds out that there’s been a series of murders in the park just outside; fear is never on his agenda.

O’Connell is an accomplished actor who has played Bottom, Puck, and Egeus in the Pearl’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mr. Darcy in Primary Stages’ Pride and Prejudice, and Edward and Robert Ferrars in Bedlam’s Sense and Sensibility — the latter two adapted by his wife, Kate Hamill — as well as appearing as himself in the one-man show The Dork Knight, about his lifelong relationship with Batman. He is ferocious in Wanda June, a force of nature who moves across the stage like a caged animal waiting to pounce. He’s like a caveman, a person from another age, unwilling to accept that things have changed dramatically while he was away, that the old-fashioned white man is no longer in charge, but it’s hard not to like him despite his shenanigans. “Hello there, young man,” he says to an empty picture frame that apparently is a photo of him. “In case you’re wondering, I could beat the shit out of you. And any woman choosing between us — sorry, kid, she’d choose me. I must say, this room is very much as I left it.” The furniture and accoutrements might be the same, but nothing else is. As exceptional as O’Connell is as Harold, MacCluggage (The Farnsworth Invention, The 39 Steps) stands her ground, going toe-to-toe and face-to-face with him in an epic battle between old and new, male and female, forward-thinking and backward-living. Oh, and be sure to pay close attention to Christopher Metzger’s costumes, particularly the color of Penelope’s dress late in the second act.

Vacuum-cleaner salesman Herb Shuttle (Kareem M. Lucas) has the hots for Penelope Ryan (Kate MacCluggage) in Wheelhouse revival at the Duke

Homer’s Odyssey meets Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape by way of Ernest Hemingway in the seldom-revived Happy Birthday, Wanda June, which initially failed in its 1970 Broadway debut (with Kevin McCarthy as Harold, Marsha Mason as Penelope, and William Hickey as Looseleaf) and then the next year in Mark Robson’s big-screen version, with Rod Steiger as Harold, Susannah York as Penelope, and Hickey again as Looseleaf. Director Jeffrey Wise (DANNYKRISDONNAVERONICA), a founding member of Wheelhouse, has a firm grasp of the material, in total control of the chaos, with outstanding support from lighting designer Drew Florida and sound designer Mark Van Hare. It’s pure Vonnegut: a potent look at America — and how much it hasn’t changed in nearly fifty years. “I just have one more thing to say,” Shuttle tells Woodly as they argue about whether fighting is ever necessary, continuing, “If you elect a president, you support him, no matter what he does. That’s the only way you can have a country!” Woodly responds, “It’s the planet that’s in ghastly trouble now.” Happy Birthday, Wanda June is an all-around triumph, one of the best plays of the season, and a sharp reminder of Vonnegut’s immense legacy.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Mr. Bennet (Chris Thorn) tries to avoid the shenanigans of his wife and daughters in exhilarating adaptation of Jane Austen’s first novel (photo by James Leynse)

Cherry Lane Mainstage Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 6, $82-$152
212-989-2020
primarystages.org
www.cherrylanetheatre.org

“How do you know if you’ve found the right match?” Lydia Bennet (Kimberly Chatterjee) asks her sisters, Lizzy (Kate Hamill), Mary (John Tufts), and Jane (Amelia Pedlow), early on in Hamill’s rousing adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, continuing at the Cherry Lane through January 6. Hamill is an actress who started writing plays to ensure strong roles for herself and other women, and she has found the right match yet again. Her latest work is her third consecutive triumphant and wholly original adaptation of a classic novel, following Bedlam’s production of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, which ran at the Gym at Judson for ten months, and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the final presentation at the late, lamented Pearl Theatre. Hamill, who has hinted that she is making her way through Austen’s books in chronological order, meaning that Mansfield Park might be next, has also found the right match in her personal and professional partner, Jason O’Connell (The Dork Knight), who plays Mr. Darcy, and in directors, with Oregon Shakespeare Festival veteran Amanda Dehnert having a blast with Austen’s comedy of manners regarding marriage and money. The show begins with the cast performing Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders’ 1965 hit, “The Game of Love,” which starts out, “The purpose of a man is to love a woman / And the purpose of a woman is to love a man.” As Lizzy soon explains, “Playing games keeps one sane, when the stakes involved threaten to drive one mad.” Mrs. Bennet (Nance Williamson) is determined to marry off her daughters to wealthy, somewhat respectable suitors, no matter the cost — since they have no male heirs to inherit their estate — so she kicks into high gear with the arrival of the goofy Bingley (Tufts), “a fellow of large income!” Bingley takes a liking to Jane, which makes Lizzy happy that it’s not her. “I am an ugly sharp-tongued awkward little creature, but you are good and kind and about five times prettier than any other girl in the county,” Lizzy tells Jane. “Nono, you shall have to fall on Mr. Bingley’s sword, and be quick about it too — the clock is ticking for us old maids!” Bright and cheery fourteen-year-old Lydia is also interested in finding a man — as is the sisters’ archrival, Charlotte Lucas (Chris Thorn), but the dour Mary sees only darkness in life amid her constant coughing.

It is not exactly love at first sight for Lizzy (Kate Hamill) and Mr. Darcy (Jason O’Connell) in Pride and Prejudice (photo by James Leynse)

Meanwhile, Mr. Bennet (Thorn) reads the business section of the Times as the women gossip, plot, argue, and complain all around him. “Matrimonial games are women’s purview, Elizabeth, and I had enough of them when my own round was lost,” Mr. Bennet says. Soon entering the proceedings are potential suitors Mr. Collins (Mark Bedard), a strange and annoying man, and Wickham (Bedard), a charming cad who was childhood friends with Darcy, in addition to the domineering and demeaning Lady Catherine (Chatterjee), who is Darcy’s aunt, and her daughter, Miss De Bourgh (Pedlow), who remains curiously hidden behind a veil. And so the game is on, and a deliciously wicked and fun contest it is. Hamill and Dehnert focus on the more comic elements of Austen’s novel, staying true to the heart of the beloved story while leaving no double entendre or sly joke on the cutting room floor. There’s a reason Pride and Prejudice has been made into and/or has heavily influenced films, opera, theater, and literary works, including such wide-ranging beauties as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Death Comes to Pemberley. Dehnert has added anachronistic songs to the show, from Stevie Wonder to RuPaul, and the doubling of the cast is an absolute riot, as Thorn changes from Charlotte to Mr. Bennet, Bedard switches between Wickham, Collins, and Miss Bingley, and Tufts shifts from Mary to Bingley right before our eyes. When an actor is not part of a scene, he or she sits in the background of John McDermott’s sweetly crowded set, laughing along with the audience at the numerous comedy bits — especially Collins’s difficulty with a chair. As much fun as the audience is having, the cast might be having that much more, even as Hamill makes her on-target points about the treatment of women through the centuries. It’s a barely controlled kind of mayhem in which anything can happen at any moment — be sure to follow the bouncing ball — adding to the ever-building excitement. “Please do pardon the chaos,” Mr. Bennet tells Wickham. “I wish I could say it was unusual.” A coproduction with the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Pride and Prejudice is a sheer pleasure, an exuberant and exhilarating reimagining of a cherished classic about the rather tricky game of love and holding out for just the right match.

THE DORK KNIGHT

Jason O’Connell channels various Batmans and villains in intimate one-man show at Abingdon (photo by Ben Strothmann)

Dorothy Strelsin Theatre, Abingdon Theatre Company
Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex
312 West 36th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 29, $25
212-868-2055
abingdontheatre.org
www.jason-oconnell.com

Jason O’Connell lets his inner geek rise in his intimate and entertaining one-man show, The Dork Knight, which opened last night at the Abingdon Theatre, where it runs through January 29 but deserves a longer engagement. O’Connell, who has appeared in such recent envelope-pushing Bedlam productions as Sense & Sensibility, Hamlet, and The Seagull as well as A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Pearl, shares his deep connection to the Batman superhero, which started for him as a child but really began taking off when Tim Burton’s Batman was released in 1989, starring Michael Keaton as the Caped Crusader and Jack Nicholson as the Joker. “That just seemed to combine everything I cared about at a very specific, formative moment in my life. And it was popular!” O’Connell, who was a high school senior in Commack when the film came out, says. “So for me, a kid who was never really on board with the popular thing — to suddenly see people loving something that I had always loved was . . . intoxicating. And from that moment on, for better or worse, the Batman movies became these touchstones in my life.” The Hofstra graduate shares personal details seen through the lens of Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, the Dark Knight trilogy, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, doing impressions of Michael Keaton, George Clooney, Val Kilmer, and Christian Bale as Batman, Nicholson and Heath Ledger as the Joker, Danny DeVito as Penguin, Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, and Jim Carrey as the Riddler. “They say the world is divided into two groups: Superman fans and Batman fans. It’s kinda like cat people and dog people. You’re allowed to like both, of course, but usually you prefer one over the other, and that preference tends to say something true about you,” O’Connell explains. “Superman sees the good in all people. Batman distrusts everyone until they prove themselves worthy. Now, I try to keep a sunny disposition, I like to think I’m an optimist at heart, and yet . . . somehow . . . Batman has always exerted the stronger hold on me,” he adds, noting how Batman has no superpowers, that he is “just a scared little boy who transforms himself through the sheer power of his will. Batman could be anybody — with a billion dollars.”

Writer and star Jason O’Connell geeks out in funny and poignant solo show THE DORK KNIGHT (photo by Ben Strothmann)

The inaugural production in Abingdon’s Second Stage Series, The Dork Knight is playing at the tiny Dorothy Strelsin Theatre, where an audience of fifty-six sits on three sides of Jerry Marsini’s spare set, consisting of a chair and a table. O’Connell occasionally sits but usually stands, telling his story in a very personable way, making constant direct eye contact with the audience as if seeking its approval and understanding — which he receives, as members of the audience regularly nod in agreement, cathartically letting a little bit of their own inner geek out. There’s also a lot of laughter along with the self-deprecating and brutally honest O’Connell’s clever insight, which includes seeing plenty of Hamlet in Burton’s Batman. His Keaton impression is dead-on; with just a few facial gestures, he looks and sounds like the controversial Batman portrayer. His Ahnuld is excellent as well, faring better than some of his others. Directed by Abingdon artistic director Tony Speciale (The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey, Stet), The Dork Knight is a fun and involving eighty-minute confession about the effects pop culture has on us all. At one point, O’Connell discusses a would-be high school date in which he and “this beautiful athlete/artist/musician who drove a convertible and had long, blonde hair that smelled like strawberries” went to see Batman, and after the film, she declared, “‘That’s a classic. That’s our generation’s Star Wars. It’s our Wizard of Oz. This is, like, art.’ To which I said, ‘Marry me please we get married now!’ She didn’t. No one has yet. But that’s another one-person show.” Whenever that next one-person show is, we hope O’Connell sends out the Bat signal, because we’ll be there in a jiffy.